Civics Lecture Series: Monsters, Bots, and Misinformation

Sean Barill and Samantha Totoni lead a symposium on misinformation at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - Main in Oakland on Thursday, October 29. It's part of the Civics Lecture Series, presented with CivicCLP, and it lands just in time for Halloween.

The whole thing uses the figure of the monster as a lens for today's information landscape. The organizers describe it as following the real and imagined bogeymen that haunt the way we get our news: zombie narratives that refuse to die, misinformation spreading from inside the house, and the flawed data, viral rumors, and misleading media that shape public understanding, professional practice, and scientific discourse. It's a way of talking about the things that mess with our heads online by framing them as the kind of ghosts and monsters that usually only show up in October.

Barill and Totoni bring two different ways of looking at it. Sean Barill is a writer and cultural anthropologist who has long used the monster as both a rhetorical device and an analytical category to comment on economic recovery in rural Appalachia. He's also collaborated on public-facing educational projects with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and Literacy Pittsburgh. Samantha Totoni is a 2025 Mass Media Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Research Director of the Communication Technology Research Lab in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Communication; her research focuses on how communities can learn from one another when responding to online manipulation and propaganda.

The symposium runs from 6 PM to 7:30 PM in the North Wing Music Room on the second floor of the library, 4400 Forbes Ave. If you can't make it in person, there's a virtual option, and it'll be recorded for later viewing.